Saturday, October 11, 2008

The Most Fun/Most Awful Day: Part 2 - Most Awful

Oh, the day at the zoo was a blast. And after we got home and had the boys fed, bathed, and ready for bed (at 7:30pm, no less - they had no nap and we knew they would go to sleep after all of the excitement of the day) - Joshua asked for something else to eat. I sometimes acquiese, but usually the answer is no because their teeth are brushed and it's bedtime (sometimes they ask just to try and stay up, which I think this was a ploy to do just that - the grandparents were here, after all!). But this time I decided to go ahead and give them a bowl of cereal since they hadn't really eaten a whole lot that day.

And about 5 minutes after I made that decision - a freak accident occured. Josh slipped on a bouncy ball and broke his leg. His left femur, to be exact. Here are the details (if you are my friend on Facebook you have most likely seen this story):

When it happened, Chris heard a "pop." He told me that, and I figured it was a joint popping out of place or something. But Josh continued to cry, and could not walk, and so Chris and his dad (it just so happens his parents are visiting from Colorado) took him to Urgent Care. They sent him to the hospital. My mother-in-law and I stayed home with the other two kiddos (and I really didn't think it was going to be anything too bad, honestly). We found out around 9:00pm that he did in fact break his leg. When Chris called to tell me that they were keeping him overnight, I decided to go. They finally got a room around 11:30pm, and I got there around midnight.

They were not able to set the leg right away due to the risk of swelling in the cast. Because of this, he was in extreme pain. They had him on morphine, but it didn't seem to be helping much. Every couple of minutes, his leg muscle would spasm, he would jerk awake and scream out in pain and then cry for a bit. I cannot explain the absolute toture it was to watch my child go through so much agony. Finally around 3:30am they decided to give him valium to help with the spasms. Even that didn't seem to help much. Chris and I took turns holding his hand and trying to calm him with each outburst. It was beyond horrible.

Finally our pediatrician came in around 7:00am, and we told her what he had gone through all night. She promptly upped his morphine dosage (God bless her), plus at 8:00am he had another dose of valium, so he finally was able to sleep for a couple of hours. We had also seen the orthropedic surgeon around 7:30am, and he informed us that he would be doing surgery at 12:30pm (are you kidding me?! 5 MORE HOURS?!). He also told us he was going to be putting Josh in a hip spica cast, which is a cast that starts at the waist, goes down his entire left leg (to the toes), and down his right leg to the knee. Completely immobile (do you realize the energy level of this child?).

We went to pre-op with him, and right before they were going to take him for surgery, he vomited several times in a row and emptied the entire contents of his stomach. We helplessly sent him off for surgery, which took about an hour, and they reported back to us that all was successful. We had to wait an extrodinarily long time to see Josh again, because he was having a tough time waking up in the recovery area (plus he got sick again one more time). It took forever to get discharged, but we finally left the hospital at 10:00pm on Thursday. We were really glad that we forced the nurse to give him one more dose of pain medication before we left, since we had to stop by an all-night pharmacy to get his prescriptions filled.

So what had started out to be a super fun special day ended up turning into a how-could-this-happen nightmare. And pretty much killed the fun for the remainding 2+ days of my in-laws' vacation (but what a memorable one it will always be!). And now for the pictures (again - these will be familiar to Facebook friends):

Daddy feeding him ice chips - his first nourishment for over 24 hours.

Right before we put him in the car to take him home - poor little guy.

But thankfully he fits in the car seat, and the morphine kicked in so he could sleep.

His set up on the loveseat.

He can still use the potty - thank you God!

Getting kisses from the baby - he missed his brother!

Josh returns the love.

He had been begging us to sleep on his belly - and this was his first belly nap - on Daddy's belly.

We hooked him up in the wagon so he could go outside.

And of course he had to be next to the baby.

Melanie came to visit, bearing Get Well gifts. We love Melanie!

So the zoo and a broken leg, all in one day. Can't say it's boring around here!

And, once again the formatting of text-to-picture is all weird, and I cannot seem to fix it. Hopefully you can figure out how they match up. If not, my apologies.

2 comments:

Hi, I am sorry to hear about your son. I wanted to drop you a quick note because we went through the same thing with our 4-year old son earlier this year (mid-February). I've had a blog for several years, but after he broke his leg, I realized I had a lot of searches on spica casts.

So I ended up pulling out the posts related to that and set it up as a separate blog. Maybe you'll find some posts that you can relate to, possibly something that might answer some questions down the road.

I'm sure my Google name will link to my regular blog, but the link to all the posts about our spica cast is located at http://spicacast.wordpress.com/ .

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About Me

I am the mother of 3 young boys: twins plus one. My daily life is filled with chaos, but there is also lots of laughter and love. Despite the overwhelming amount of work and the neverending list of thankless chores, I am happy to be home with my trio of boys. There are days when I am on the brink of insanity, but those are the days when I pray a lot and then think about people like my grandmother who had 13 kids. That gives me some perspective. I am striving for balance, which is a real struggle right now. But thankfully God is in control, and this is but one phase in my life's journey. But as for now I am truly in the trenches.